The present disclosure relates generally to the field of semiconductor manufacturing and, more particularly, to a system and method to report business capital data.
The semiconductor integrated circuit (IC) industry has experienced rapid growth. Technological advances in IC materials and design have produced generations of ICs where each generation has smaller and more complex circuits than the previous generation. However, these advances have increased the complexity of processing and manufacturing ICs and, for these advances to be realized, similar developments in IC processing and manufacturing have been needed. For example, an IC is formed by creating one or more devices (e.g., circuit components) on a substrate using a fabrication process. As the geometry of such devices is reduced to the submicron or deep submicron level, the IC's active device density (i.e., the number of devices per IC area) and functional density (i.e., the number of interconnected devices per IC area) has become limited by the fabrication process. Certain processes, such as a copper damascene process, may be selected to achieve the desired device density.
Furthermore, as the IC industry has matured, the various operations needed to produce an IC may be performed at different locations by a single company or by different companies that specialize in a particular area. This further increases the complexity of producing ICs, as companies and their customers may be separated not only geographically, but also by time zones, making effective communication more difficult. For example, a first company (e.g., an IC design house) may design a new IC, a second company (e.g., an IC foundry) may provide the processing facilities used to fabricate the design, and a third company may assemble and test the fabricated IC. A fourth company may handle the overall manufacturing of the IC, including coordination of the design, processing, assembly, and testing operations.
In managing the business of IC manufacturing, many kinds of files needs to be distributed among users. These may be business report files, may be of different file types, in different file formats, and associated with different application software. For example, some files may not be easily extracted to form an email attachment. All users, including outside users such as customers and shareholders, and inside users such as the management and marketing teams, may require report files through different media, such as emails, faxes, and/or wireless devices. There is not currently available an integrated system and method to circulate files on a variety of media. It is expected that such a system could reduce the cost on management effort and processing time, improve processing efficiency, security, report or analysis thoroughness, and/or provide enhanced report distribution.
Accordingly, what is needed is a system and method to implement an integrated file server to automatically process a variety of files, combine information, and/or transfer the files to recipients through different media and formats according to applications and needs.